Splash

The news, on Thursday afternoon, that an Airbus A320 carrying a hundred and fifty passengers and five crew members had touched down in the middle of the Hudson River was surreal enough that, for many New Yorkers, the only way to get across the singularity of what had happened was to compare it to something else. The initial, panicked analogue, as the plane scudded low across the skyline—so low that office workers could see it out their windows—was September 11th. “Call 911!” a lawyer on the forty-fourth floor of 787 Seventh Avenue, yelled to his secretary. At MTV, an executive, gazing out at her usual patch of river, replayed bygone vistas: cruise ships carving their slow, bizarre turns; huge orange barges; boats; the day the Intrepid returned to Manhattan, trailing red-white-and-blue rooster tails. She recalled, “At the moment the plane hit, I was on a conference call, and saw it skidding across the water, with huge sprays coming out, and, honestly, I thought it was some other weird water celebration, with jet skis.” As the projectile stopped, she realized it was a plane. Black stuff started swirling in the water. It reminded her of squid ink. From up high, the perspective was screwy. In the cell-phone pictures that emerged, within minutes, from skyscrapers across the city, the skiffs, ferries, pontoon boats, and inflatable tenders that convened to carry out the rescue could have been Battleship game pieces circling a bathtub toy.

The plane had gone down with a blue flame spewing from its left side, “Omar, out on Fordham Road” was saying on 1010 WINS. Meanwhile, on Taxi TV, a meteorological graphic read, “Who opened the icebox?” On a day so cold that nature had nearly brought the commuting masses to heel, the early word that the plane’s engines had been crippled by errant Canada geese seemed absurd, and cruelly appropriate. Soon enough, the cause of the crash was official: “double bird strike.” Up to their bare ankles in forty-degree brack, the passengers stood shoulder-to-shoulder on the plane’s sinking wings. From shore, it appeared that they were walking on water, or standing on a sandbar, gigging flounder. The partially submerged fuselage was an iceberg. Its tail was a dolphin’s fin. That the plane had been felled by the very creature of which it was supposed to be a simulacrum seemed beyond metaphor.

Everyone wanted to get a look at the wreckage. Peter Brookman, a corporate salesman, had glimpsed it first from his office, on Thirty-fourth Street. “We could see the plane, floating down, but it was going so fast,” he said. Brookman, gripping a copy of the Journal, had ditched a four-o’clock appointment and dashed out to the West Side Highway. The current was strong, and the half-submerged plane was moving fast, faster than onlookers could catch it, like a mechanical bunny at a greyhound race. Already, it was four-thirty, and the mess had swept past Chelsea Piers, minutes ahead of Brookman. The hunt was beginning to take on a mythic aspect, as bystanders traded misinformation and squinted into the darkening horizon, as though attempting to sight the Loch Ness monster, or a rare whale. “I was thinking of one of those Stephen King books where everybody’s just, like, following the light,” Brookman said. “It’s like everybody’s going towards it. What do we all have in common that’s taking us all to the same place?”

By five, the sky had turned a sooty purple, and the Lackawanna sign was casting low red light. Cameramen sidestepped the carcasses of Christmas trees, carrying their equipment over their shoulders, like skis. Whatever there had been to see wasn’t there anymore. Everything looked like something else.

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